Libertarians Need to Get Real About Politics
1st September 2025
All libertarians will agree that government exists in the United States. Thus, they will agree that governmental evil is afoot. They will also agree that that evil may be greater or lesser. Since it is fanciful to hope to eradicate governmental evil entirely, the conscience calls libertarians to mitigate governmental evil.
To do one’s part, one must formulate and assess rival evils. America has a two-party system, Democrat and Republican. That contest is not the only one; there are contests between rival evils that cut across the two parties and that divide either or both of the parties. But the choice between Democrats and Republicans remains highly salient. Given these choices, we contend that libertarians should usually favor Republicans over Democrats.
My problem with libertarians is the same as my problem with Marxists:
(1) They think that politics is downstream of economics; if you get the economics right, the politics will follow. This is horseshit. Politics is upstream of economics, as it is downstream of culture. Culture will determine your society’s politics, and politics will determine your society’s economics. Politics is about morality, and your culture’s morality will determine your attitudes toward property, profit, and taxation, not the other way around.
(2) They focus on an artificial person, who is neither a reflection of real people, nor (if it were) accounts for the whole of a population. Libertarianism is built on the assumption that everybody in the society is a rational adult, and can make rational adult choices. This is obviously absurd to anybody who spends any time out among people, much less reads the news. Marxism is built on the assumption that society consists of two mutually exclusive classes, bourgeois capitalists and proletarian workers, and the purported class struggle between them. This takes no account of the progress from manual worker to financially independent investor that millions have traveled since Marx started scribbling.
Both ideologies are a triumph of a-priori reasoning over actual experience. I have no time for either, or their proponents.